ATCM: 'Journalists: Heroes in Their Own Minds'

An excerpt from Against the Corporate Media, coming Sept. 10 from Bombardier Books. "Journalists; Heroes in Their Own Minds," by Jon Gabriel.

Sometimes, a selfie is worth a thousand words. CNN White House reporter Jim Acosta, the definition of journalistic self-regard, posted a photo to Twitter midway through the Trump presidency. Taken just before his 2018 appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Acosta stares longingly into his Broadway-style lighted mirror, grasping a director’s chair emblazoned with the show’s logo. His reflection gazes into the camera’s eye revealing his bottomless well of self-satisfaction, insolence, and unearned pride. An open box of Zantac sits on the vanity.

The image was widely mocked across social media, much to the shock of the D.C. press corps. That picture revealed far more than the flaws of one spotlight-hogging reporter. It laid the soul of modern political journalism bare: the media’s supercilious id and ego, perfectly framed in an ignorant instant. Acosta quickly turned into a lightning rod, getting banished from the White House after a set of tedious stunts and histrionic hatred for the president of the United States. Yet he is far from the only Narcissus on the Potomac. The legacy media’s love for itself is topped only by its contempt for its audience.

You really can't hate them enough.

It’s difficult to describe how awful modern journalism has become. It is preening, biased, ignorant, vainglorious, arrogant, unfair, corrupt, vindictive, smug, anti-science, and stupid beyond measure. It hasn’t always been this way. Vintage news hawks reveled in their role as a yellow rabble of ill-educated, over-intoxicated, ink-stained wretches. Today’s reporters, inconceivably, consider themselves our betters.

Their pretension to status is puzzling. Perhaps, they could have been lawyers but lacked the intelligence or study skills. Or politicians, but they’re too socially awkward. Engineering is out of the question; they don’t know math. Science, too, as it requires critical thinking. Not good-looking enough to be Hollywood celebrities, not entrepreneurial enough to create businesses, not courageous enough to be out-of-the closet activists, let alone out-of-the-box artists. The only requirement for modern journalism is a rudimentary ability to stitch sentences together at forty words per minute. For on-camera talent, not even that. Contrary to recruitment pitches from the Columbia School of Journalism, reporting is a trade, not a profession.

Average journalism-school graduates watched their fellow undergrads go on to wealth in finance, innovation in technology, or power in politics. Meanwhile, the high Masters of Journalism are struggling to avoid replacement by college interns and to out-write AI software. After years in expensive schools cozying up to the right people, they believe that an equal professional respect is due. The trouble is, they’ve done little to earn it.

The media follows a socialism of status, demanding cultural equity with the newsmakers they cover. The members of the media don’t realize that the elites consider them with as little regard as does their dwindling audience. Striving for acceptance into the right social circles makes them all the more desperate to parrot the conventional wisdom of the ruling class. See, I’m on your team, the reporter thinks, as the Vice Undersecretary for the Department of Agriculture (Tropical Fruit Division) glances across the room to find someone worthy of his notice.

To please their corporate masters and retain their at-risk jobs, today’s media staffers must generate clicks. Sober analysis and accurate reporting never stir the blood as much as cheap emotionalism. Combine that with the old newspaper maxim of “if it bleeds, it leads,” and modern journalists are paid to catastrophize everything. Journalists love a crisis, even if they have to invent one. At least labeling anything they dislike a “crisis.” Each day’s headlines warn of a climate crisis, housing crisis, refugee crisis, energy crisis, and financial crisis—and that’s just on page A1. There are also crises of food insecurity, racial disparity, income inequality, and mental health equity.

Perhaps journalists could improve that last item by not catastrophizing every issue that has plagued humanity since ancient Sumer. But one crisis left unnoticed has doomed journalism to dwindling audiences, rising irrelevance, and public contempt. Newsrooms from Washington to San Francisco, New York to London, suffer from a humility crisis. What makes this odd is that journalists have so much to be humble about...

Pre-order here.